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“... effect, on all these fronts at once. I am particularly fond of ‘Deid Dugs’, a tale told by Simon, a chancer of such doe-eyed irresistibility and ruthless rapacity that he goes among his disgusted yet envious friends by the name of Sick Boy. At the beginning of this story, Simon is sitting at his window with an airgun ...”

“... policy in the Thirties were less wise and consistent than is usually believed. Robert Rhodes James, however, not only endorses the traditional appreciation of Eden’s periods as Foreign Secretary: he claims that his Suez policy was absolutely justified and only wrecked by wrong-headed and pusillanimous Americans. The differing attitudes of the two ...”

“... last letter to his beloved wife. Harshest and most searing of all, however, are the cartoons. In James Gillray’s Un petit souper à la Parisienne, published in 1792, a scraggy woman bastes the body of a baby dangling over a fire; her companions squat bare-arsed on the dismembered carcasses of their victims, feasting on their flesh. One devours an ...”

“... too glad to avoid vengeance from his fellows by impersonating the great in perpetual concealment; James Pool and Suzanne Pool’s Who financed Hitler?, which opens with a luxurious gathering of bankers and party ‘higher-ups’ with their sleek women, just a shade less exotic than the gathering in a Japanese restaurant of Spanish-speaking kameraden that ...”

“... In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche gives what Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster call a ‘fascinating short interpretation’ of Hamlet, from which they take their title. They don’t think much of the book up to that point: it’s when he gets to Hamlet, they argue, that Nietzsche wakes up. This isn’t a view everyone would share, but it’s of a piece with the many assured judgments they make about Hamlet in the play with the most canonically self-doubting hero ...”

“... everyone was sympathetic to forms of woe – especially to deformities. In Cruelty and Laughter, Simon Dickie mounts a compelling case against what he calls ‘the politeness-sensibility paradigm’, by resurrecting a jeering counter-discourse that revelled in human suffering and physical affliction. His point about the sentimental 18th century is partly a ...”

“... novelist worth catching up on and following, in the wake of and on a level with the likes of James Buchan, Tessa Hadley and Edward St Aubyn. The four books are distinct – there’s no real overlap to speak of – but possess the sort of shared traits that a reader likes to find in an author, and an author in himself. London and the South-East is a ...”

“... observations which epitomise the art of film come in as asides, as when, writing about Michel Simon, he invokes ‘the special mingling of self and character that is so necessary (and dangerous) in screen acting’. (This, by the way, is a rewrite. In the previous edition it read: ‘the special mingling of self and character that is so hallucinatory in ...”

“... atheist family. Abram and Elizabeth had seven children: Julie, Millie, Jay, Celia, Ann, Simon and Benny. Julie and Millie married ‘in’, their respective husbands, Harry and Sid, being successful businessmen in the clothing trade. Harry was a bit of a wide-boy, with a billiard table in the front room. He got mixed up in some shady business during ...”

“... women could still hear his cries through the prison walls. His keepers were a shoemaker, Antoine Simon, and his wife, who dressed the child as a sans-culotte, and tormented him. Marie Antoinette could sometimes catch sight of her son through a crack in the wall; this, Marie-Thérèse remembered, became her mother’s ‘sole occupation’. Marie Antoinette ...”

“... first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson; but even they arrived by what might be called the bohemian route. There are of course other ways in; anybody can see how much space the dons occupy in the respectable papers and magazines. Many moved in by routes that did not necessarily ...”

“... Rebecca is Fine Blend NV. Are the coffee people setting up against the sugar people who own the James Bond copyright?) He has benefited from astute merchandising, especially in the US. It was an American publisher who first made him big, and like Higgins (and unlike the more chauvinistic Forsyth), Follett affiliates himself primarily to his transatlantic ...”

“... its revenue, the company was vested in trustees. But the press as a whole had no such luck. As Simon Jenkins has reminded us, the great proprietors bought and sold their newspapers for power, prestige and, they hoped, money. The brothers Harmsworth launched the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror while Scott was wrestling with Home Rule for Ireland and the Boer ...”

“... number of people hurt by Bellow is probably no more than can be counted on two hands,’ James Wood wrote, ‘yet he has delighted and consoled and altered the lives of thousands of readers.’ Leader quotes this early in the book and goes on to split the moral difference. ‘Though opinions will differ about the morality of this calculation,’ he ...”

“... the promised projects had failed to materialise. Insiders leaked emails and financial documents to Simon Clark and Will Louch at the Wall Street Journal, who started to publish evidence of malfeasance. US federal prosecutors brought fraud charges against Naqvi, and in April 2019 he was arrested on disembarking from a plane in London. He paid £15 million in ...”